A.I. Chatbot + 2D space exploration game!

[mrzo]

Hey SFML fellows,

So I love space exploration games (first thing I tried with SFML was an asteroid shooter)! But space is big - so sometimes it is a little bit boring to fly through or to do the daily trading grind all by yourself. That's how I came up with the idea of an A.I. assistant who gives you some company. Her name is Hopper. She is not the smartest conversational android out there but at least she knows how to steer a space ship.

The game is called Black Sun and it will take some time before I can put it in a polished-enough state to release it in Early Access but I am already very excited to share this trailer with you:



The libraries I use are:

• SFML for graphics, input and audio
• entt (https://github.com/skypjack/entt) as Entity-Component-System toolkit. I think I will never go back to pure OOP-based game development 
• Sol (https://sol2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) as Lua-C++ bridging interface to allow Lua scripting / modding within the game.
• tensorflow (https://www.tensorflow.org/) and cppflow (https://github.com/serizba/cppflow) for the machine learning model powering the chatbot engine

You can follow the development of the game on steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670930/Black_Sun/) or on twitter, youtube or soundcloud (https://linktr.ee/blacksungame).

Take care and if you have any questions, feel free to ask

[eXpl0it3r]

That's a really cool idea!
I always wondered how an adventure game would look like with an AI

Is the response time from the "AI" really as fast as in the trailer?

[mrzo]

It is actually almost instant so I had to add a small delay to make it more "human-like"

It's quite fast because a neural network translates the input string into a fixed size vector which is compared with an existing database of vectors of other pre-translated semantic patterns. This allows me to cover many different wordings of the same commands (e.g. the vectors for "Repair the ship" and "Fix the damage please" are quite similar). When finding a similar pattern, I can simply return its recorded response or call its attached action.

The database currently contains around 10k pairs of patterns and responses / actions. But even with 1M of patterns there shouldn't be any problem with the performance since it is a simple cosine similarity calculation

[mrzo]

I added a fast dynamic grid so I can finally resolve collisions between hundreds of asteroids.

[mrzo]

Some people asked me on other channels how the actual gameplay looks like so I made an extra trailer showing it.



In general, you can decide how to steer your space ship: completely by yourself or by using the A.I. assistant. The same is valid for combat. You can ask the A.I. to take over the weapons and put it either in defensive mode (only firing at hostile missiles) or aggressive mode (attacking hostile ships directly). Or - if you feel like it - you can take control of the guns and fire at your will.

[mrzo]

Some updates on the development:

• I overhauled the complete GUI with an uniform color theme and new widgets.
• The A.I. assistant considers your surroundings: you can refer to objects in the game such as stars, stations or hostile ships and the chatbot responds to that.
• I implemented a trading system with economic cycles. If you are clever, you can make money by buying
   and selling resources at the right time. You can always ask your A.I. assistant for more help.

If you want to see some screenshots, you can have a look here:
https://imgur.com/gallery/7vOOrfb

Or you can visit the steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670930/Black_Sun/?utm_source=sfml

[eXpl0it3r]

Oh, I like the new screenshots

[mrzo]

Hi there! 

Finally, I finished working on my demo for this game. Quick recap: in this 2D-space game, you fly a space ship and follow a cinematic story line. Your sidekick is an A.I. chatbot who understands your text written commands and helps you throughout the game.

The demo might take 20-30 minutes to finish depending on your skill level. If you want, you can continue to play afterwards and explore more of the world.

This game is for people who like to play other space games such as Escape Velocity or Endless Sky and love text adventures.

If you have a Windows 10 PC and would like to try it out, leave me a DM and I'll send a steam key to you.

[mrzo]

A fellow game developer playtested my game and made a small video about it.

You can check out his stream here: https://youtu.be/xxczdSH5L7o?t=21

He mentioned a few important points about that my steam page not really told him what the game was about.
I will address this by making new trailers and better screenshots in the next weeks. Overall I am super happy with this experience since it was my first public playtesting. The streamer gave a lot of tips and helpful feedback to me. He is an awesome guy, check him out if you are also interested in getting your game playtested!